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Over the month we have talked about what are the benefits of virtual assistant and how you can find and hire them. Today we’ll discuss what to do once you’ve hired a virtual assistant.

1. Establish workflow early:

You should establish the workflow with your virtual assistant from the beginning. Rather you expect from your VA to be available in certain hours or to concentrate over working on the longer tasks and just update you weekly, also when they want from them to be available online and what would be the mean of communication if he/she is unavailable and you need to speak them necessarily, all these matters should be discussed from the beginning.

Have a comprehensive discussion of your task list with your virtual assistant. If you’re outsourcing a call center, remember that the tasks are rotated between the different persons, not solely to whom you talked while interviewing. So the task list helps them to prepare themselves better for it.

Ask your VA to send you to submit a daily, weekly or monthly report about the tasks they’ve done and also that how much time the each task took.

2. Identify a medium of communication:

Identify a medium for two-sided communication. The medium of conversation could be email, Yahoo, email, Skype or other Inter Messaging tools. If you haven’t met the person personally, I won’t recommend you to communicate via email. Instead you should communicate to your VA via IM or Skype.

3. Give instructions comprehensively:

While writing the instructions, be specific as possible and make sure that these instructions contain step-by-step explanations. The virtual assistants work over the tasks across different industries but to make sure that your work has been done effectively, you’d need to hire a specialized VA. If possible, show an example to finished task.

Mostly the tasks are explained by using the Excel spreadsheets but another great to explain a task is marked up screenshots. The launch of Firefox plugin FireShot has made the screenshot creation addition of annotations to it pretty simple. To explain the project in more depth, video screencast can also be used. CamStudio is a great tool for creating video tutorials.

4. Allocate more time to VA initially:

A thing you need to understand is that in the beginning your virtual assistant will take time for getting use to with you. So give at least two-three hours extra to them to get their work done. For example, if you can complete a task in two hours, expect your VA to take 3-4 hours, it might take a bit more than this but will be lessened gradually with the development of a good working relationship between you and him/her and a time will come when the task will be completed early than your expectation.

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